Development in the Functionality of Grammatical Cues in Hebrew Sentence Comprehension.

Sokolov, Jeffrey L.

Research on the grammatical cues that guide comprehension of a language and that children are most sensitive to, particularly in Hebrew, is reviewed as an introduction to the first phase of a study conducted with 20 native Hebrew-speaking children aged 4 to 9 in southern California and a group of adults to provide comparative data. The study assessed the subjects' response to the competition between accusative and morphological cues in a sentence-picture correspondence task. It was found that the main effect of age could be attributed to differences between the 4-year-olds and 9-year-olds. It is also suggested that in most cases the children all trusted the accusative cues more than the morphological ones, and the oldest children trusted the causative verb pattern most while the younger trusted the reflexive pattern. Several explanations are provided for these results, including the competition theory, developmental patterns, and bilingualism effects. The second phase of the study will look at the patterns of monolingual Hebrew speakers. (MSE)